Interventions
Workshop Christian Grüny & Christoph Haffter
Additional Workshop
Tutors: Christian Grüny, Christoph Haffter
When: 2 x 2 sessions (per Summer Course week, in the afternoon), plus a final reflection plenary. Exact times to be announced.
Who: Open to all registered Summer Course participants. The procedure will be announced as soon as the registration for the Summer Course is completed.
DESCRIPTION
Reflexive Reset: theoretical interventions
Playing music is a bodily, affective and intellectual activity. Teaching addresses all these dimensions. In particular, contemporary pieces and their notation pose technical as well as theoretical problems. They need to be contextualized and explained but coming to terms with contemporary music is just as much about open debate and individual reflection.
The interventions aim at precisely this: In 30-minute sessions before the actual workshop, we will read together and discuss passages from philosophical works that deal with fundamental questions concerning space, time, history, meaning, identity etc. These texts do not explain the pieces, nor are they necessarily part of their context. The theoretical interventions aim to puzzle and provoke, to astonish and awake intellectual curiosity. Hence, instead of orchestrating a transition to the workshop, there is a break across which the previous discussion continues to affect the work in unforeseeable ways.
Rather than explicitly addressing questions specific to the pieces at hand, the intervention is about getting into a reflective frame of mind, establishing an atmosphere that is conducive to the complexity of playing contemporary music, about questioning presuppositions and initiating discussions about fundamental questions concerning music and art in general.
Additionally, there will be an afternoon workshop in the second week of the Summer Course to reflect on what we did, how it worked, and in which different ways theory and philosophy can play a role in the musical process.